What do you like best?

Semaphore is the fastest service of its kind. This is the main advantage of this service. I can notice an excellent documentation that helped me sort out and solve any problems. I also like the ability to run tests in parallel. And the most important thing is customer support - the fastest response that I ever received. I also liked the ease of setting.

What do you dislike?

The main disadvantage is its price, but for this speed is not a big claim. Just a little, not a user-friendly interface. Now it is convenient to work with it, but for the first time, it completely confused me.

Recommendations to others considering the product

This is really the fastest service. You will save quite a bit of time. Try and see for yourself.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We have a large team and several large projects. Parallel execution is just a godsend for us. Since testing takes quite a bit of time, we can run several assemblies and save a lot of time.

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What do you like best?

I have been using different CI for a long time. The configuration of your PC is very important for these services, but the old CI did not use all the power of our server. We had only one problem while using Semaphore and the support worked at the highest level, our problem was solved very quickly. By the way, support is fast as in the paid plan and in the free.

What do you dislike?

The base platform of some services is very outdated. I have a problem when installing MySQL, because of obsolete plugins. Until now, there are some important functions that competitors have long had.

Recommendations to others considering the product

The program has an excellent free plan. Support, even for a free plan, works amazingly. The simplicity of service and excellent support make your choice.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Our team moved to Semaphore with CircleCI. We were immediately surprised by the speed of work. Tests are performed almost twice as fast. Now we save a lot of time and concentrate on more important functions.

What do you like best?

The price is far cheaper than travis and makes the product perfect for prototyping an app that requires a lot of iteration. Additionally I found several useful guides for integrating the service with AWS / Firebase, which made the setup process fairly quick.

What do you dislike?

I have seen multiple consecutive days of downtime. While these were apparently the result of an upstream provider, it made little difference to me as the end user, because I simply could not deploy my app. Stability and reliability in a CI service it probably even more important than ease of use and for Semaphore's price I would happily put up with some degradation in UX, in favor of reliability. I make the same tradeoff for other services and find it worthwhile on my shoestring budget.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Look at the uptime stats and community support consider whether it is worth the tradeoff to you for the price.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I'm prototyping an app and need testing and deployment on every check-in, for which Semaphore is well suited. Additionally I only have a handful of repositories that require check-in, so Semapohre is allowing me to operate on a very low budget while still having all the benefits of quick deployment. Through the published guides I've also discovered AWS tools such as CloudFormation that I did not know about and are well suited to my purposes. When funding it less of an issue however, I'll be likely to move to Travis because of its relatively higher stability.

What do you like best?

We used CircleCI for a while till the day their server kept running out of memory. Common, it's not to test (and then build) bunch of Java apps on 2 (2.4 Ghz) cores and 4GB RAM. 3.8Ghz with 4 ~ 8GB of ram solve everything

Java, no problem, webpack, done at ease. All of that our quality of development completely.

What do you dislike?

Not really dislike but they definitely they can do better with test result / artifact management. Luckily, we rely on Docker for most of things, but it's definitely much nicer if Semaphore can facilitate as well. Others may find struggling when firstly adopting solution

Recommendations to others considering the product

Semaphore doesn't offer much out-of-the-box functionality, you'll may need to apply work-around here and there. But just having powerful rig is already worth a try for you

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We work in quite strict environment that takes long time and effort to actually release. To mitigate that, we try to make sure every release is a GO, less regression, less likely to fail a microservice/integrations. That means, we have A LOT OF tests, all of them are heavy duties. Say, integration tests between all microservices, E2E test to most functionalities.

It's used to be 40 mins on CircleCI, and with just 10 minutes now on Semaphore. That's 3 times better development flow

What do you like best?

The support has been fantastic since we started using it about 2 years ago. Questions are answered very very quickly and the interface is laid out in a common sense way. I actually love the interface. They aren't trying to make a big deal about it but the lack of visual clutter really makes this a great match for us. It is simple and straightforward. We can easily build complex workflows just like a MakeFile. Docker integration is straightforward and perfect. It has all the features that you would expect and none of the proprietary nonsense that a bunch of other CIs have.

What do you dislike?

I wish their base platform was a little more up to date. I'm not talking about Python or NodeJS which always track the latest version but GCC is a little old and prevents us from using some packages. Specifically `mysqlclient` cannot be pip installed on the platform because it requires gcc-4.9 and the LTS version of Linux they are using only has gcc-4.8. We've gotten around this but it would be great if they could jump that hurdle.

Recommendations to others considering the product

The simplicity and the support make this a worthwhile choice.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

CI and testing are how we survive. We do short bouts of development throughout the year and then have ~6 months of no development. Returning to working codebases is critical. Semaphore has made the barrier of entry on this very low.

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